CAREER: Elements of Interactive Cartography: Design Principles for Interactive, Online, and Mobile Maps

地图现在对社会来说无处不在。它们在汽车、手机和社交媒体上随处可见。现在，各个领域的专业人员都在使用地图技术来解决地球上许多最紧迫的问题，美国劳工部估计，到2010年，美国地理空间劳动力超过了42.5万人。个人计算和信息技术的最新进展从根本上改变了地图的制作和使用方式，这要求教育工作者重新思考如何在教育环境中教授地图，专业人员需要重新装备，以适应一系列新的技术能力。尽管过去半个世纪地图学领域的许多经验研究都涉及表示设计(地理信息的图形编码)，但关于交互设计(实现用于操纵在线或移动地图的数字界面)的经验推导和经过时间考验的原则相对较少。承担这一项目的调查员将开展四项研究活动，以解决制图学和地理信息系统科学中交互设计的关键和总体需求。调查员将通过对在线新闻地图的内容分析来描述当前互动地图设计的做法。他将通过一项对照实验，评估不同地图阅读任务的独特互动形式的效用，从而制定互动地图设计的指导方针。他将通过第二次实验，评估不同专题地图类型(例如，脉冲线、点密度、等值线、比例符号)的互动性的效用，并通过实地研究评估各种应用环境中的移动地图设计，确定移动设备上的地图设计的最佳做法。这一学院早期职业发展奖将支持一个项目，该项目调查交互式地图的设计，并通过在线或移动设备提供。该项目将使用混合方法研究来建立设计有效的交互式、在线和移动地图的基本原则，从而为地理空间工作人员提供关于当代地图设计的指导。该项目将响应在地图学和地理信息科学(GIScience)中关于交互设计研究的众多呼吁，并将促进人机交互、信息可视化、可用性工程和视觉分析等新兴的跨学科交互科学。该项目将通过新的课程作业和设计学徒制度创造独特的本科生和研究生学习机会，并将制作几种开放获取、公开提供的产品，包括一个可扩展的网络地图编码库、一个有设计和技术教学材料的博客以及一本关于互动制图学的电子教科书。这个项目的最终结果应该是更好的互动性、在线和移动地图。

Maps are now ubiquitous to society. They are found in cars, on phones, and across social media news feeds. Professionals in a variety of fields now use mapping technologies to address many of the Earth's most pressing problems, with the U.S. Department of Labor estimating that the American geospatial workforce exceeded 425,000 people by 2010. Recent advances in personal computing and information technologies have fundamentally transformed how maps are produced and consumed, which requires educators to rethink how mapping is taught in educational settings and professionals to retool in response to a new range of technical competencies. While much of the empirical research in in the field of cartography over the past half century has addressed representation design (the graphic encoding of geographic information), relatively few empirically derived and time-tested principles exist regarding interaction design (implementation of a digital interface for manipulating an online or mobile map). The investigator undertaking this project will undertake four research activities that address critical, overarching needs for interaction design in cartography and GIScience. The investigator will characterize current practices in interaction map design through a content analysis of online news maps. He will develop guidelines for interactive map design through a controlled experiment evaluating the utility of unique forms of interactivity for different map reading tasks. He will integrate representation and interaction design principles through a second experiment evaluating the utility of interactivity for different thematic map types (e.g., choropleth, dot density, isoline, proportional symbol), and he will identify best practices for cartographic design on mobile devices through a field study evaluating mobile map designs in various application settings. This Faculty Early-Career Development (CAREER) award will support a project that investigates the design of maps that are interactive and are delivered online or through mobile devices. This project will use mixed-method research to establish first principles for designing effective interactive, online, and mobile maps, thereby providing guidance regarding contemporary map design for the geospatial workforce. The project will respond to numerous calls for research about interaction design within cartography and geographic information science (GIScience), and it will contribute to the emerging and interdisciplinary science of interaction crossing human-computer interaction, information visualization, usability engineering, and visual analytics. The project will create unique undergraduate and graduate student learning opportunities through new coursework and design apprenticeships, and it will produce several open-access, publicly available products, including an extensible web mapping code repository, a blog with design and technical instructional material, and an electronic textbook on interactive cartography. An ultimate result of this project should be better interactive, online, and mobile maps.